Visual Software Online Store

Welcome to Visual Software’s online store. At this site you will find information about our products, hardware and prerequisite software requirements and will find links to order our software.

In order to see prices for our products, you will need to create an account. To do this, press the ‘Register’ link at the top right corner of this page. When you have filled out the form, it may take us a little while to validate your request, but when we do, you will get a return email. After you get that verification, you may log into the site and then you will see the prices for all our products.

Veracity™ is a SIF agent that when attached to a SIF zone, collects data published by all other agents in the zone.

As the data is collected, Veracity tests the data with rules that reflect the data quality policies of the organization to see where the data falls short. It then provides continual, useful feedback to those responsible for its maintenance where corrections need to be made. Since the data is centrally housed, it also serves as an operational data store for reporting and analysis.

Lastly, its business rules engine can be used to provide data quality gateway functionality.

ZIServer, Visual Software’s Enterprise class Zone Integration Server, was built using Microsoft’s .NET Platform, LINQ and SQL Server, it is designed for flexibility, performance, scalability, auditability, manageability and security.

ZIServer is certified for the US 2.x specification and has versions available for the UK and Australian specifications as well. It supports multiple zones and multiple agents per zone and has advanced features such as message level auditing and element-level filtering.

ZIAgent™ is a full-featured, configurable SIF agent designed to work with existing applications (in contrast with an Agent Development Kit that requires that the agent be written). It is an alternative to the error-prone process of custom-developing an agent from scratch or by using an ADK because the agent itself has been developed, tested, debugged, streamlined and certified many times over. ZIAgent can typically be fully configured and SIF-certified in a matter of days with no programming and with few or no modifications to the host application.

Veracity™ is a SIF agent that when attached to a SIF zone, collects data published by all other agents in the zone.

As the data is collected, Veracity tests the data with rules that reflect the data quality policies of the organization to see where the data falls short. It then provides continual, useful feedback to those responsible for its maintenance where corrections need to be made. Since the data is centrally housed, it also serves as an operational data store for reporting and analysis.

Lastly, its business rules engine can be used to provide data quality gateway functionality.

Mimic is an interface designed for certain types of applications that were never intended to be members of a SIF zone. These applications maintain student information and can create comma delimited extract (often referred to as Comma Separated Values or CSV) files and store them in a fixed location on a regular basis.

Fully integrated with directory services such as Active Directory, it manages the mappings between user types and characteristics assigned to people by publishing applications and the roles those people play in subscribing applications.

Envoy is a multi-faced SIF agent that solves a number of challenges encountered by large educational organizations that need to implement a SIF architecture that will be shared by a large number of schools and/or districts. These include:

If the organization manages its data at a consolidated level (district, regional or state), but needs to provide SIF services to subscribing applications at lower layers, the data needs to be correctly split up and managed in SIF zones corresponding to those levels.

If this organization is fed information from many different sources and:

it needs to consolidate the information

it needs to merge information about students, teachers and contacts when information about them may occur in more than one source system

it may need to redistribute that data in other groupings of schools (for example, data is sent from individual schools to a state and a subscribing application needs the data at a regional level (between the school and the state))

The first year installation and support is included with every ZIServer license. Maintenance plans are available for after the first year. Our pricing model for these has two tiers to reflect the amount of support that our customers typically require from us. There are two components to these plans:

Software updates

Customer support

The software updates are continual and are based on new innovations we put into our products, plus changes required to meet the updates required to meet new SIF specifications. The cost to us for this component remains relatively the same, regardless of how long a customer stays with us – it is more dependent on changes in SIF specifications. Customer support requirements, typically diminish as a customer keeps a product installed from year to year. This is why we have a tiered support model where the third years and beyond are less expensive than the second year. By the third year, we have found that the installations have gone through all of the challenges that they might face (such as an end of year rollover, mid-year application additions and summer school).